We are six librarians working in academic, public, and school libraries across the United States. In addition to essays by its founders, In the Library with the Lead Pipe will feature articles by guests representing special libraries and archives, as well as educators, administrators, library support staff, and community members..

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is intended to help improve our communities, our libraries, and our professional organizations. Our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions. Each article is peer-reviewed by at least one external and one internal reviewer.

Bringing Yesterday's Classics to Today's Children: "The Baldwin Project seeks to make available online a comprehensive collection of resources for parents and teachers of children. Our focus, initially, is on literature for children that is in the public domain in the United States. This includes all works first published before 1923. The period from 1880 or so until 1922 offers a wealth of material in all categories, including: Nursery Rhymes, Fables, Folk Tales, Myths, Legends and Hero Stories, Literary Fairy Tales, Bible Stories, Nature Stories, Biography, History, Fiction, Poetry, Storytelling, Games, and Craft Activities. "

The well known Librarian's Internet Index (LII) has merged with IPL at Drexel. As many are aware of, and as mentioned in the notice below, LII has had their funding cut by 50% the last two years. The merger with Drexel allows ILL the opportunity to continue sharing of sites.

This notice appeared in their last weekly e-mail:

LII IS NOW ADMINISTERED BY IPL
This week the editors received a press release announcing LII's merger with the Internet Public Library (IPL). IPL is a huge and wonderful Web portal hosted by Drexel University and maintained by a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science. It has solid funding and a paid staff augmented by graduate students in library and information studies programs, allowing it to maintain and improve the database's content and aesthetics with new skills and technical tools.
As you may know, in the last two years LII's funding was cut by 50%. Consequently, we had to reduce the number of sites we add each week, halt improvements to the browsing structure, and generally do less of everything. IPL will give LII's years of work continued life and value and we think they'll do a terrific job. The LII editorial staff and the newsletter will continue through April 30, 2009. We will share news with you as it becomes available; for more information, please contact IPL or Linda Crowe at

Language education site Busuu emphasizes the social side of learning a language. While Busuu has standard components such as vocabulary exercises with audio and writing units to test out your composition, the most interesting aspect is its ability to connect you with both people learning your language and native speakers of your language. You're learning Spanish and someone else is learning English.

A quick look shows it is a relatively simple service and a good way to get an introduction to a new language. By no means is it comprehensive, but with the social aspect theres a chance to connect to others and go beyond the basics.

Via Lifehacker:
A few months back Lifehacker started a section titled "Hive Five" that answers the most frequently asked question: "What's the best tool for the job?" The top tools are chosen by the users and here they present the best of the best from 26 different categories. Many, if not all, of the tools are free. Here is their best of the best.

Joe Wikert Takes a look at authonomy and likes it. It's a community site for authors, editors and anyone else interested in the publishing business. If you're an author you could use authonomy to get feedback on your manuscript and increase your visibility. The rules are pretty simple. You need to post a 10,000-word (minimum) portion of your work for review by other authonomy members. As other members read, review and rank your work it gains visibility on the site.

Bookshare.org believes that people with print disabilities deserve the same ease of access to books and periodicals that people without disabilities enjoy. The Bookshare.org library provides print disabled people in the United States with legal access to over 40,000 books and 150 periodicals that are converted to Braille, large print or digital formats for text to speech audio. More about Bookshare.org

"BibSonomy is run by the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel, Germany. This system is intended to support everyone, but in particular researchers, in sharing bookmarks and bibliographies. One main reason is that we have to deal with bibliographic data all the time, needed a more coherent way to manage our bibtex data. Another - even more important - reason for setting up BibSonomy is that social resource sharing systems are very popular nowadays, but do still lack theoretical foundations. Our aim is to tackle the research challenges that arise around systems like BibSonomy, and to provide more sophisticated support for tasks like browsing, searching, ranking, and community discovery."